five endings that didn't happen
by katriel1987
Summary: Five ways the Winchester men didn't end...and one way they did.


**t****itle:** five endings that didn't happen (and one that did)  
**author:** katriel1987  
**rating:** R  
**characters:** John, Dean, Sam (no pairings)  
**category:** Preseries (mostly), deathfic, darkfic  
**word count:** 600  
**disclaimer:** not mine; not getting paid; I'm just playing with them.  
**summary:** Five ways the Winchester men didn't end, and one way they did.  
**notes:** This isn't graphic, but it is _dark,_ hence the rating. It has some extremely disturbing themes, including violence against children. There is also character death. Repeatedly.

* * *

_five endings that didn't happen..._

**1.**

John went to get Sammy out of his crib one morning, two months after the fire. Sammy's skin was cold to the touch and his chubby limbs were rigid.

_Sudden Infant Death Syndrome._ It was nobody's fault, they said. Sometimes it just happened.

It finished what Mary's death had started.

Mike and Kate raised Dean. They figured it was the least they could do after failing to save his dad.

**2.**

"Daddy." Sammy tugged at John's pillow. "Daddy, there's a monster in my closet."

John rolled over and groaned. "Go back to sleep, Sammy. You know there's no such thing as monsters."

"But Daddy—"

"Go to sleep!"

Sammy sighed expressively, and a moment later his small feet padded back down the hall.

John never saw him again.

**3.**

Fire followed the Winchesters everywhere. Motels, warehouses, abandoned cabins—no matter where they stayed, things burned with no apparent cause. John started researching pyrokinesis. He didn't want to think that about Sammy, didn't want to even _go_ there (it wasn't Sammy's fault, it _wasn't_), but the questions had to be answered.

When Dean was twelve years old, he caught on fire while sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal. John heard Sammy screaming and ran in to find a blackened mess where Dean had been. The room smelled of burnt sausage.

At the hospital, Dean woke only once, three days after. His eyes were still swollen shut, but he turned his head slightly toward John's voice and whispered, "Daddy?"

"I'm here, Dean," John said. "It's okay." Lied, because nothing would _ever_ be okay.

Tears squeezed out of Dean's ruined eyes. "Mom," he said.

John thought, _No, please, not yet notyetnotyet._ "You see your mom, Dean?" He asked.

Dean nodded a little. The burnt skin on his neck cracked and blood oozed out. "She says...she's sorry," he whispered. "She...just wanted...to hug me."

He died fifteen minutes later.

**4.**

Dean was good at following orders. Oh, he had his moments like all kids, but mostly he obeyed, especially since the shtriga.

John would never know why he didn't stay put. Wanted to prove himself, maybe, show that he was old enough to hunt. All John knew for sure was that he left his little brother sleeping, took a gun, and headed out into the woods.

John found him just after dawn, curled into a ball, skin as white as the snow around him. He was frozen so stiff that John couldn't even uncurl him to try CPR.

Dean hadn't found the werewolf. Hadn't found his way back to the cabin, either.

**5.**

John always knew that humans could be as evil as anything supernatural, but it never really hit home until he came back from a hunt to find his boys gone.

It took him three days to track down the bastard that had them. Sammy was already dead by the time John got there, face down in a crusted pool of blood. He was the lucky one.

Dean couldn't scream anymore, but he was trying, making sounds that were more animal than human. John knelt beside him, and Dean fell quiet at the _click_ of the gun being cocked. Maybe he knew it was finally over.

"I'm sorry," John said, and tears streamed down his face as he pulled the trigger.

He kept hunting monsters after that. He just stopped caring whether or not they were human.

* * *

_...and one that did_

**1.**

They sat side by side on the railing outside an abandoned diner and watched fire stream across the sky toward them.

They weren't afraid.

_end_


End file.
